1. Technical Field
The invention relates to management and viewing of “favorites” or “bookmarks”. More particularly, the invention relates to an enhanced favorites service built in to a Web browser as well as available from a web site, accessible from any web browser.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Web browsing has evolved into a sophisticated information management process. Web browsing sessions produce much information that the user may wish to access at a later time. Currently, users save Web pages of interest as “favorites”. Each favorite is manually cached by the user in one of several subject matter relevant folders. This process is both inefficient and inexact. The user must make a decision based on imperfect information, i.e. the user may not have fully reviewed the content of the page that is being added to his favorites list, and thus places the page in the wrong category. The later retrieval of such favorite information may be hampered by such wrong categorization.
It would be advantageous to provide an automatic and consistent approach to organizing favorites.
Further, many such favorites have feeds (conforming to RSS or other standards) associated with them. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites such as Wired, news-oriented community sites such as Slashdot, and personal web logs. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way (see http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html). Currently, Web pages that have associated RSS feeds provide a list of RSS items when the page is linked to. Modern browsers, such as Safari (Apple Corp, Cupertino, Calif.) provide an icon that indicates that such pages contain RSS content. Such browsers also indicate the presence of new RSS content in a favorites list with an indicium, such as an icon or numeric indication. Unfortunately, there is no way for a user to review a favorites list and determine if any of the information on the linked page is of interest, except to follow the link to the page in question and review the information at the page itself. Because much of the RSS information is duplicated over many Websites, a user invariably wastes time reviewing information he has already seen.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a mechanism that allowed a user to review RSS content without having to link to the page which provides such content.